Hey everyone, just wondering if you could give some feedback on my models lighting. Ive tried to simulate the light to the background image…is there an easier way to do this other than place loads of lights?
thanks
IMO your light is wrong 
The lava fountain in the back is one of the main lightsources. So why is the fron of the guy in light? It should be dark and the rimlight of the guy should be orange-ish.
Also if you´ve ever been in a steelmill, the hot metal creates an orange diffuse light. I´d go with environmental light there and for such scenes ambient occlusion is your friend too.
If you are intrested, post up your blend (don´t froget to pack the background image into it) and I am sure you´ll get some nice different setups posted back from forum mebers where you can look into and see and learn this or that…
This is a really great start!
I would recommend lowering the intensity of the fill light in front of your character. Most of the light is coming from the lava behind the character, so there wouldn’t be as much overspill. Maybe change the color to be a darker orange or red? That will help better reflect light that would be coming from that side of the model.
You may also want to change the position of the key light as well - it’s a little too far to the right. If you move it more behind the character it will give it a tighter rim on the character and would better reflect the effect the lava would have on your model.
Maybe add a really low intensity light above the character as well to lighten those black areas? Other than that this is a great start! Keep up the good work!
thanks for the feedback, I agree that the light at the front is too bright…ive uploaded my file with the BG image as requested…thanks for the help 
Darth mortis.blend (887 KB)
Attachments
Short on time I gave it a quick go, it is far from good but it should give you an idea:
Seeing the UI layout I had to guess you used 2.49 so the file is for 2.49, the setup looks wrong in 2.5
I used white and yellow area lights and placed them to produce the rim lighting.
The front is an area light as well without specularity to give it the diffuse light the still hot floor would emit.
Used subtractive ambient occlusion and thats about it.
Finally a glow/fog node as compositing effect.
Don´t use subsurf lvl3 for setting up lighting =)
It is cumbersome, just leave it at 1 or turn it off at all.
Load the file with the UI, I have all the intresting windows open
I would use an HDRI to provide the lighting and color adjust it using RGB curves/contrast/gamma to get the oranges, but that’s just me.
thanks arexma, the rendered image looks great…haven’t had a chance to open the blender file yet…but thanks for the feedback and help 
WOW…just looked at the blender file…i didn’t know you could do any of that stuff, as im really new to blender, only been using it for a week. Have been wondering what nodes are and now i kinda know…it all looks great, thanks